


some of my favorite people are things

by scioscribe



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aging, Gen, Implied Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 07:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enough love and time can, of course, grant personhood to objects, particularly when in the hands of someone who has never believed much in the division between objects and people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	some of my favorite people are things

Enough love and time can, of course, grant personhood to objects, particularly when in the hands of someone who has never believed much in the division between objects and people: artificially created, that. One thing can always be turned into another, that’s the way of the universe. The Doctor himself is progressively becoming a thing. He wakes up some mornings and yes, feels positively _thingy_ , though in about seventy-three percent of cultures it’s impolite to mention it.

But it is, he is saying to a fellow in New Amsterdam, like shoes.

“You have a new pair—or at any rate new-ish, I’m always turning up shoes somehow—and at first the leather’s stiff and everything’s pinchy.”

The shoes he turns up rarely fit him correctly, which is an additional puzzle.

“But you walk in them for a bit, or you run—which speeds things up considerably—and they develop all those cracks and grooves and things that make them so much more interesting and comfortable than they were before. It’s like they start to remember you. And you slip your feet into them and it’s all, hello. Shoes. And you wouldn’t mistake them for anybody else’s, would you?”

It turns out that no one in New Amsterdam is interested in fun or existential metaphors involving shoes. He wanders around for a bit, but whatever he’s looking for isn’t there, so he chooses Upa Minor+ in 35,101—a good year, a really _vintage_ year—and waits there. He embroils himself in a bit of local politics and accidentally becomes mayor, which is embarrassing. He isn’t the slightest bit qualified for it: can’t juggle more than three guavas at a time, for one.

But that’s politics for you.

He tells an Upa Minoran+ about the shoes, adjusted for cultural context, and she says that yes, she knows. “Because once I loved a ring I wore around three fingers, one and one-half infinity shape, and nicked from the machinist shop and discolored by time, I could not have exchanged it for another, and when lost, never replaced.”

“But you _lost_ it.” He can’t help but feel that’s a betrayal of it all.

“Because it was a person,” she says, “with a soul? Easier to lose a person than a thing. People all the time go away.”

“It’s like the shoe,” he says, only he doesn’t say _shoe_ , because no decent Upa Minoran+ would admit to possessing something as unclean and tawdry as _feet_ , “becomes a person, and then the person becomes a thing, as, well, we all do. Given time.”

“Given time,” she agrees.

On Earth, he goes to see Martha, and she tells him how her mother died. “She didn’t remember me at all by the end,” Martha says, but she doesn’t cry: he’s late in her timeline and she’s in her seventies herself. She has done most of her crying already. “She barely remembered herself. But I don’t like saying time made a thing of her.”

“You’re human, you think it’s an insult, thingness. It isn’t. Some of my favorite people are things.”

“Cadavers are things,” Martha says. “What are you thinking of, Doctor? Your shoes look new enough to me.”

“No,” he says sadly, “they’re old,” because it’s been so long since he found any. It’s been a very long time since anything unexpected happened to him at all: everything has been going according to plan. All of his travels have become, over the years, increasingly more _likely_. He goes where he means to go and stays there as long as he stays, and he is not tilted askew by the whims of his mad goddess, who would carry him on a wilder wind to a more dangerous place. And he even had to go shoe-shopping in seventeenth-century Scotland, because it had been ages without anything turning up, and his soles were flapping like open mouths. Empty chatter. He mostly keeps himself company these days, but even he hasn’t stooped so long as to be led astray by shoe-talk, which is, as everyone knows, mostly gossip.

“If things become people,” he says, “then they can also turn back into things.” He is thirteen hundred years old, now, and this is how he understands dying: as complexly and simply as a child.

“And then into people again?” Martha says lightly.

“I’m fond of the idea that it keeps turning about, universe as carousel, matter as such, but it’s wishful thinking. I could long almost anything into existence, Martha, but I think that might be the limit of me.”

The TARDIS will die. Oh, she won’t die the way he will, someday, when he burns the last of his bodies up in the search for incandescence, or wears himself out. She won’t even die like his oldest pairs of shoes: her cords unraveled and her stitches spent, uncoiling into parts. She was made to last, his girl, and last she will. The universe will collapse upon itself like so much wet candy floss before she’s gone for good, except that’s not true, is it? She’s already going now. What will be left is her body, to be driven from place to place and time to time, a husk that he can scrabble about in. She no longer takes him where he needs to go. She is, now, just the vehicle of his desires.

She is what he stole and only that; day by day, she is less and less the thief of him.

And one day he will take her to London in the nineteen-sixties and walk by her twice mistaking her for another police box, the likes of which are on every corner. She will no longer be home, and she will no longer be his, and she will pinch, just a little, somewhere in the very center of him, where he will look to be comforted with what once mattered, and was true.


End file.
